blogs.perl.org

We’ve had a few people email in to ask how to “submit” a game for the cPanel Game Night at YAPC::NA 2012. The event is free-form. There’s no reason to submit a game in advance. However, you are welcome to organize game events on the conference wiki.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

First post, the post that hurts the most. Well ... not ... but still in time before the y2k12-maya-bug triggers.

I am late in writing this summary about my hackathon but it fits the prolongation style I exercised this time. I had quite a slow start as I found it difficult to flush my overfull @work mindset and resume my open source projects. I used my flight delay to carefully prepare a TODO list which finally helped on that flush'n'resume exercise. So what did I do? My pet project is benchmarking Perl. There I have one major problem:

• The visible benchmarks are boring and the interesting parts are invisible.

My benchmarks are rather straight lines without interesting changes: they are straight in the 5.8 timeline; they are straight in the 5.10+ timelines.

However, both straight lines are different to each other, so obviously something must have happened during the 5.9.x times. Unfortunately, exactly that interesting timeline did not work well in my benchmarking toolchain.

So the mission was:

Today, I'm proud that I can announce 2 big things about PrePAN:

PrePAN is now open source!

PrePAN team finally published the source code onto GitHub repository. You can freely commit the actual code. Any contributions including submitting issues, improving documentations, etc. are welcome!

PrePAN has been taken over by Kyoto.pm!

PrePAN had been developed with my personal efforts and resources. But, from now, Kyoto.pm, Kyoto-based new Perl Mongers, took over it, so you can expect continuous and more active development of the features with organizational support.

Kyoto.pm is planning to hold a hackathon to hack the site in July. Keep your eyes on us!

I was reading about the Inline module the other day, so naturally I looked to see if there was a binding for one of my other favorite languages, Lua. Sure enough, Inline::Lua exists; however, it has not seen a new release in nearly five years, and it doesn't even build on perls newer than 5.10. I like this idea enough that I'd like to put some time into it and cut a new release; however, I haven't been able to reach the author. So, in accordance with the guidelines I read in the CPAN FAQ, I'm making a post asking if the original author, Tassilo von Parseval, is still in the Perl community and interested in updating this module.

-Rob

At YAPC::NA 2012 we’re introducing YAPC Bingo! These cards are a fun way to help make sure you get the most out of YAPC. You can cross each thing off as you accomplish it working your way toward a bingo. Or maybe, if you’re an over achiever, you’ll attempt to cross off all 25 and achieve a mega-bingo!

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

Last week, I posted on my Other Blog about how I still prefer to use tcsh for my interactive shell.  Of course, I maintained that bash was the only real choice for shell scripts.

I love to write command line applications (eg. App-iTan, Business-UPS-Tracking, Game-Lacuna-Task, Mac-iPhoto-Exif and many more not publicly available). However most of the CPAN tools I generally use to build these applications either are not as user-friendly as I would like them to be, or are not flexible enough.

I decided to change that and wrote MooseX-App.

It handles commands with multiple subcommands, generates usage text, error messages on wrong user-input, validates options, and lets you write your program as easy-to-test and reusable classes. Just as App-Cmd (or MooseX-App-Cmd respectively). However compared to these options it ...

• is more flexible
• supports plugins that can overdrive almost all of its behaviour
• does not impose a certain application structure on you (thus making code reusage and testing easier)
• does not pollute your command classes with many methods since most of its logic is implemented via meta classes
• and is quite user friendly by providing useful input hints, better error messages as well as optional colorful output and bash completion

So let me give you a short example:

Hope you like it.

It should go without saying that when you are writing a book, you need to know how long the chapters are. I'm writing mine in vim, with various customizations to fit the needs of the book. However, I then need to convert my book into MS Word format. As I'm using Word 2008 for Mac, and as its the only version that does not have a scripting language built-in, formatting my plain text to the publisher's requirements is a long, tedious process. There are different headings, code, sample exercises, tables, images, "Try it out" sections, and many tiny, tiny details that need to be formatted correctly to ensure the book can be laid our properly.

From guest contributor brian d foy:

Conferences are virtually non-stop activity, networking, hacking, and socializing. YAPC, which is only three days, will have over 400 people moving around between talks, between buildings, and to other places in Madison. There’s a lot more going on besides the conference schedule: you don’t need to show up to hear the talks (they’ll be uploaded), but you do need to be there to hang out with people, carry on unstructured conversations in real life, and drink with other attendees.

The problem, though, is that many things are already in motion by the time that you step up to the registration table to get your badge. YAPCs have been going on for over a decade and many of the people already know each other in meatspace. They already know who they’ll go out with in the evening, they already know who they want to pair program with, and .

You need to start planning your YAPC strategy early and start lining up the things you want to accomplish.

So, apart from London, Oslo, and Zurich, I’m delighted to say that I’m now also going to be visiting Lisbon during my current European speaking tour…on May 3rd and 4th.

We’ll definitely be offering a public talk one evening for the local Open Source community (I’ll update when I have the details), but we’re also running a couple of public classes in Portugal for the first time in several years.

The classes are the recently updated Features of Modern Perls and the hugely popular Mastering Vim, and you can sign up for either (or both, with a discount) on the Caixa Mágica website.

I’m very much looking forward to catching up with many friends in Portugal next month. And, after what will have been nearly a full month in London and Oslo, and as lovely as those two cities are, I suspect I will secretly also be looking forward to some warm and sunny weather as well. ;-)

Damian

I've hacked a '-MO=Deparse' option to perlito5. Now I can check the parser by comparing the output with perl:

$ node perlito5.js -Isrc5/lib -MO=Deparse -e ' ${ xxx{zzz}[3] } '
# Do not edit this file - Generated by Perlito5 9.0
use v5;
use Perlito5::Perl5::Runtime;
package main;
$xxx{'zzz'}->[3];
1;

compare to:

$ perl -MO=Deparse -e ' ${ xxx{zzz}[3] } '
$xxx{'zzz'}[3];
-e syntax OK


In case you're curious:

% grep -rli assassin federal_register | wc -l
      50

That's 50 mentions of "assassin" in the US Federal Register since early 2000. There's some interesting stuff buried in this publication.

Recently I wrote a post about more Americans giving up citizenship than reported. While I don't have exact numbers (they're hard to find), I managed to put together some information that seems to show that far more Americans are giving up citizenship than the Federal Register reports, but I'll skip the background.

Basically, I decided to download the entire Federal Register in XML format (it's in the public domain, too). Unfortunately, this snippet of code is not going in the book.

Josh Jore will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

This is a collection and walkthrough of things I’ve found useful for debugging emergencies in production.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I've uploaded to CPAN:

o CGI::Snapp::Dispatch V 1.00.

This distro includes CGI::Snapp::Dispatch::Regexp.

Both modules support usage in a PSGI environment.

This module is a partner for CGI::Snapp, and together they are almost drop-in replacements for CGI::Application, CGI::Application::Dispatch, CGI::Application::Dispatch::Regexp and CGI::Application::Dispatch::PSGI.

The default for logging is to not create a logger, as per CGI::Snapp V 1.01 below.

There are 63 tests.

PSGI is supported without needing a module called CGI::Snapp::Dispatch::PSGI.

o CGI::Snapp V 1.01.

This has a new mutator _psgi() for use by CGI::Snapp::Dispatch.

Also, the default for logging is now to not create a logger.

PSGI is supported without needing a module called CGI::Snapp::PSGI.

o CGI::Snapp::Plugin::Forward V 1.01.

The tests explicitly create a logger since CGI::Snapp V 1.01 now does not.

o CGI::Snapp::Plugin::Redirect V 1.01.

The tests explicitly create a logger since CGI::Snapp V 1.01 now does not.

Github makes accepting patches from other people and applying them soooooo easy!

Instead of having to extract the patch from an email onto my workstation and manually apply it, applying this contribution was a simple matter of clicking on one button.

Thanks Mark - and thanks Github as well!

We needed a simple way of sending messages to HipChat (great online chat software, BTW), so I cooked up this:


#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use WWW::Mechanize;

# See https://www.hipchat.com/docs/api/method/rooms/message for info
my $url = 'https://api.hipchat.com/v1/rooms/message';
my $api_key = 'your-api-key';
my $from = 'User-to-post-as';
my $room = 'room-to-post-to';
my $message = $ARGV[0];
my $color = $ARGV[1];

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new;
$mech->post( $url, {
room_id => $room,
from => $from,
color => $color,
message => $message,
auth_token => $api_key,
});

Quick and dirty - no error checking. Works well for the situations we are using it in, but you may wish to make something more robust before doing anything serious with it.

Enjoy!

Joel Berger will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

Many scientists use Fortran for their numeric modeling. Some of my fellow Ph.D. candidates have done all of their work in Mathematica. Closer to home, L<PDL> provides Perl with some really nice numerical array handling power. Still, all of these tools left me looking for something higher level.

In this talk I will present some of the modeling paradigms I have been using in my research. These simulations model physical systems as Perl objects (rapid designing of classes via L<MooseX::Declare>). Dynamics are closures which genereated by some objects and influence others. Using this paradigm, simulations are written quickly and are tremendously flexible and extensible.

For the majority of the talk, I will use a Perl-level fixed time-step differential equations solver. At the end, I will introduce (ever so briefly) my L<Math::GSLx::ODEIV2> module, which I use to solve systems of differential equations which are made of closures over these object/closure systems.

I hope this talk will show that high-level languages can be used to model physical systems and make it feel very natural to the Perl programmer.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I'm currently writing Chapter 15 of my Beginning Perl book and it's about Web programming. The first part is about server-side software and the second part is about clients.

When I finally sat down to write about Web applications, I thought of what I should do. Some of you may remember my old Web programming course, but that was written around CGI and just wouldn't do. So I need to use something modern, but since I have a deadline, that means writing about something I know fairly well. That seemed to leave me with two primary options: Catalyst or Dancer. The latter is easier to use, but still "magical" enough to hide things I wanted to explain. Exploring other options would mean learning to use them and possibly missing a deadline.

That's when inspiration struck.

I had to install a version of Storable 2.30 for a client on their server and was getting the following error

failed to map segment from shared object: Operation not permitted
Can't load '/tmp/del/Storable-2.30/blib/arch/auto/Storable/Storable.so' for module Storable: /tmp/del/Storable-2.30/blib/arch/auto/Storable/Storable.so: failed to map segment from shared object: Operation not permitted at

The error was due to the fact that I was trying to build and run the tests on a /tmp directory which had noexec enabled , moving to a different directory solved this issue